OS X 10.11 El Capitan to lead Apple forward

El Capitan introduces enhancements to window management, built-in apps and Spotlight search, with a focus on faster performance driven by Metal, Apple’s graphics technology, which is integrated into El Capitan.

As expected, OS X El Capitan gets the new system font, San Francisco, which was first seen on Apple Watch and the new MacBook keyboard.

Mission Control has been given a spruce up and you can simply drag a window to the top of your screen to access the new Spaces Bar in Mission Control and create a new Space.

The new Split View, which mimics a similar feature in iOS 9 and signals that the two operating systems are coming closer together, automatically positions two app windows side-by-side in full screen, so you can work with both apps.

We are particularly happy with the new mute button in Safari that quickly silences browser audio from any tab – auto-playing audio and video is one of our pet hates.

Mail introduces Smart Suggestions, which recognises names or events in a Mail message and prompts you to add them to your contacts or calendar with a single click. You can also now swipe to delete messages, just like in iOS, and juggle multiple emails while Mail is in full screen.

In Photos, you can add locations to a single image or an entire Moment, and sort albums by date or title. Additionally, you’ll be able to download third-party editing extensions from the Mac App Store and access them directly within the Photos app.

With the all-new Notes app in El Capitan you can drag and drop photos, PDFs, videos and other files into notes, and add content directly from other apps, such as Safari or Maps, using the Share menu. It also supports checklists and the new Attachments Browser organises your attachments in one simple view, making it easy to find what you’re looking for.

Spotlight gets smarter in El Capitan, generating results for even more topics, including weather, stocks, sports, transit and web video. You can now resize the Spotlight window to display more results or move it anywhere on your desktop, and use natural language to find documents and files on your Mac based on when they were created or who you sent them to.

El Capitan also features enhanced international language support, including a new Chinese system font for both Traditional and Simplified, with 50,000 beautifully designed characters for crisp on-screen readability. Chinese keyboard input methods now offer regularly updated vocabulary lists and a smarter candidate window. El Capitan makes entering Japanese text faster by automatically transforming Hiragana into written Japanese and reducing the need to individually select and confirm word conversions. You can now also select the perfect font for your documents using four new Japanese typefaces.

The developer preview of OS X El Capitan is available to Mac Developer Program members from today. Mac users can participate in the El Capitan Beta Program in July and download the final version for free from the Mac App Store during the Australian spring.

Customers interested in signing up for the public beta can visit www.apple.com/osx/elcapitan-preview/ for more details.

Perhaps. But it’s a developer conference and there were a lot of API/under the covers changes announced around the various “Kits” Apple provides. I really miss the Macworld keynote they used to do every January. But those days are behind us.